]]>This week at South by Southwest, I met with a cool startup called DueDil, which is trying to provide a Lexis-Nexis-meets-Google-meets-LinkedIn style of service that aggregates public data on companies from a variety of databases, then uses that to create new metrics to indicate how solvent or successful the business is and will continue to be. In talking to founder Damian Kimmelman, I realized that the aggregated data his company has access to could help remake popular ratios and metrics used today for risk analysis.

The company, which is based in the U.K., has raised £250,000 ($401,855 USD) of angel funding and currently has data available on 7.7 million British companies. Eventually, however, Kimmelman wants to bring the service to the U.S. if all goes well in Britain. Obviously, such a service would be useful for investors, especially as the secondary market for shares in tech firms picks up speed, but I became fascinated by the idea that by aggregating different sources of information from financial databases, LinkedIn, Twitter and public records, DueDil is making correlations between data sets and solvency that people may never realize exist. For example, there’s a relationship between lawsuits and a company’s ability to repay loans, according to Kimmelman.

It’s been difficult to track multiple lawsuits against a company in one place, but DueDil wants to make it easy, then automate the algorithm to determine the correlation between such lawsuits and loan repayments. Other predictive attributes will likely emerge as more information is gathered, aggregated, then tested for correlations. It brings me back to the idea that what’s really powerful about the coming wave of big data isn’t that tons of information is in one place, but that from seeing all that data, we can see correlations and links that help us ask better questions to determine success.

After all, statistics may not lie, but they can be manipulated. Asking the right questions and seeing new relationships is more important than merely running the same queries faster or against more data. For more on the topic of big data, check out our Structure: Big Data event on Wednesday in New York City, or watch it streamed via our site. We’ll be dealing with how to turn data into actual wisdom, and, from there, into revenue.

]]>Preparing for South by Southwest Interactive every year, I’m inundated with pitches for services (now they’re apps when they used to be social or merely web-based products) that are fun, sometimes useful and generally something I wouldn’t pay money for. Since the magical breakout of Twitter in 2007 and the Foursquare success of 2009, SXSW has become more and more cluttered with startups trying to break out. It has also become a celebration of startups in general. However, that celebration has turned into a fetish — placing the act of creating a startup on a pedestal without casting any sort of critical eye on the quality or likelihood of that startup or idea succeeding.

For example, Wired just ran a story about the 160 applicants riding on six charted buses from Silicon Valley to Austin prepping some business idea en route to the event. After 48 hours coding on the bus, these applicants will be disgorged in front of a panel of judges that will choose the StartupBus winners. Meanwhile, there are at least six other startup contests or app contests happening during the event (I’m a judge at one of them). But amid the hundreds of startups launching, pitching, forming or otherwise trying to break out at SXSW, how many of them are real businesses? How many of them are thought out beyond a scrawl on a napkin, or a quick debate ahead of a startup weekend?

The Wired story notes that last year’s StartupBus winners DormDorm and DateBrowser never became real businesses:

“Two teams won last year: DormDorm, a startup designed to rent colleges’ vacant dorm rooms to travelers during the summer, and DateBrowsr, a Hot or Not for dating profiles the service pulled from several sites. Neither actually became real businesses, but many people involved in the StartupBus’ virgin voyage claim the experience was integral to both their personal and professional development, whether from skills learned or from connections made. Mick Johnson from the DormDorm team was accepted into startup funding firm Y Combinator and launched Whereoscope, which tracks family members by their cellphones.”

Of course these didn’t become real businesses. Most dorms already have programs to rent their rooms out during the summer and have had them for years, and a few calls could have easily nixed this idea. As for DateBrowser, that’s not really a business; it’s maybe a toolbar. Wired and the founders gloss over the fact that the winners of this startup competition never even had a chance at becoming a real business by focusing on the learning experience and the connections that the ride helped founders make. But I can’t.

The thousands of startups today that are pitching themselves at app competitions or in industry conferences all seem to think being a startup is enough. That daring to come up with some idea, any idea, and build a beta site is enough. That the users will come and then the business model will come and then the money will come. Google, Facebook and Twitter are their icons. Somehow the act of creating a startup has become the goal instead of the building of a business. As this post in The Awl points out, there are now startups built to merely create launch pages for your startup. (The Awl highlights LaunchRock, but Prefinery is another. I can’t believe there is a me-too startup even trying to build a market for startup launch pages.)

My issue is less with those littering the web with launch pages — if people want to take some time to test out a web site idea in their spare time, that’s far better than watching Two and Half Men reruns — but with the media, the venture firms and the ecosystem that has been built up to worship this idea of a startup. Maybe a little less fawning in the coverage and a little more skepticism is needed. For example, why is Wired devoting space to a startup competition that produced no real startups? If we called it “160 people get on a bus to Austin with their laptops,” it somehow doesn’t have that same cachet. Nor would it be worth sending an actual Wired blogger along to provide “updates from the road, as Wired.com reports every glitch, bathroom stench and late-night code dump on this perilous journey into the dot-com cosmos.”

Eventually, many of these sites will fade away, and domain names purchased on a whim after a late night of coding will expire. Some startups may get bought by Google or Facebook for their engineers, and even fewer will eventually realize their startup has the germ of a business which means that the startup will suddenly “pivot,” face the outcry from users, and perhaps make some money. Perhaps this has always gone on, but without Twitter and the infinite news hole offered to blogs, most of the offerings that fade away never infringed quite so much on people’s consciousness. But again, I’m not sure it’s just the bubble mentality and fawning coverage. On the web, it’s easy and cheap to create a prototype of an app or an idea and call it a startup. But is it a business?

I wonder if it dilutes the value of having a startup or calling yourself an entrepreneur. I think the fetishization of startups has helped create somewhat of a bubble, if not in valuations, then at least in me-too apps that will likely be deleted as soon as SXSW is over and everyone moves on to the next hot app. Yes, it has become cheaper to start a business, but has it also cheapened what it means to build a startup?

This rant seems to be part of a general zeitgeist, so why not wander over to the stories below for other thoughts on the issue:

]]>With so much of our lives stored in the cloud, there’s a cottage industry sprouting up around helping us search across our personal data. Backupify is getting into the act by launching CloudSight Search, a new service that lets users search for data across cloud-based accounts, but also restore them in their original location.

CloudSight, which will launch in private beta, follows the path of startups like Greplin, CloudMagic, and the recently announced Primadesk, but it adds in Backupify’s experience in backing up and restoring data. CloudSight Search will be available to Backupify users and will be activated after they back-up their data. It will support Facebook, Twitter, Google Apps, Flickr, Picasa, LinkedIn and other services. CloudSight filters results based on keyword, by date, and by the type of service to deliver the most relevant data first.

It’s an interesting idea that goes beyond personal data search functions popularized by Greplin. Newer startups are not only looking to help users find their information but also do something with it. Primadesk, for example, lets users manage their data from one account so they can get a unified e-mail inbox for all their accounts or drag and drop pictures from one photo service to another. Rob May, co-founder and CEO of Backupify, said social search services need to do more than just search now.

“Emerging social search engines are exciting but limited in that they only let you locate information – not restore it if it was deleted or view it if your cloud service is unavailable,” said May. In short, it’s not enough to have search in the cloud; you have to be able to manage and manipulate that data across services whenever you want in this “post-PC era.”

Backupify is also trying to appeal to enterprise customers with CloudSight Search, saying that it will help social media and compliance workers track online customer-facing corporate communications across cloud platforms. Google Apps domain administrators will also be able to use CloudSight Search to search the archives of users, which can help in restoring lost or deleted documents.

Backupify, which currently has 140,000 customers, will be showing off Cloudsight at South By Southwest. To sign up for the private beta, visit here.

]]>For those planning to hit South by Southwest this year, I figured I’d share a few local area startups you should make it a point to meet while you’re down in lovely Austin, Texas. I polled some locals, as well as consulted my notes about cool startups, to pull together this list. Feel free to debate the merits of it in the comments or add your own suggestions. For those who didn’t get a chance to meet last year’s recommended startups, check out the 2010 crop of SXSW Austin startups and say hello to them, too. Some of the companies on this year’s list as well as some from last year’s and many others can be visited on Thursday, March 11 during the Austin Startup Crawl. And welcome to Austin.

Mutual Mobile. This firm builds apps — and lots of them. The firm built Google’s Boutiques app as well as iOS apps for NASA, Dell and StumbleUpon. It also worked with Gowalla to translate the location-based services’ app to BlackBerry devices and improve Gowalla’s Android app.

Ravel. Big data nerds rejoice, because Zach Richardson, COO of Ravel wants to help you generate structured data from the web. It has also developed a version of Google’s Pregel built on the Hadoop stack called Golden Orb for large-scale graph processing tat it plans to open source at the end of March.

FoodontheTable. This company offers a neat web-based service and a potentially lucrative niche in the ad market, by helping consumers plan meals then create shopping lists that correlate to deals in their local grocery stores. A basic version of the service is free, and one can upgrade for more complete meal planning and access to additional recipes and storage for $10 a month or $70 a year.

WPEngine. Given that there are almost 18 million WordPress sites (see disclosure), and not all bloggers are thrilled to host those sites themselves, WPEngine, which is a host for WordPress blogs, is a pretty interesting play. The company launched last July, and says that because it only does WordPress hosting, it can allow site owners the ability to fully customize their configurations exactly as they would if they were hosting it themselves.

HurricaneParty. This free iPhone app is one of those trying to combine your location, your friends and makes party recommendations based on who’s there and how close it is to your physical location. The software bears a resemblance to the GroupMe, Beluga, Yobongo phenomenon. The app launched last year.

SharpSkirts. This startup aims to become a community for women entrepreneurs and provide classes, events and other resources to help women push other women to succeed at the startup game. Founder Carla Thompson was formerly at Guidewire Group, and many entrepreneurs may know her from her days helping organize the DEMO conference (disclosure, Thompson is a friend of mine).

Macheen. There’s nothing social about this company, which means many in the dev-focused SXSW crowd may ignore it. But Macheen, which has created a sort of cloud-based mobile virtual network operator for retailers and device makers, has the potential to fill a very big need in the connected devices community. And the potential payoff there could be huge. I wrote about Macheen’s launch this week.

MassRelevance. This startup offers Software-as-a-Service that helps big businesses manage and monitor their brand via social media, as well as engage with actual and potential customers in real-time. It launched in December with $2 million in funding from Austin Ventures and Mike Maples Jr.s’ Floodgate Capital.

Socialware. Wondering if errant employee tweets may put your big business at risk? Socialware aims to help companies who have to worry about heavy compliance issues protect themselves while still enabling them to use social media. The company dubs itself “social middleware” and last month raised $3 million from Floodgate, G-51 Capital and Silverton Partners.

Envaulted. Register a credit card with Envaulted and get 1 percent cash back on all the purchases you make. The company also tries to negotiate group discounts based on where its users are shopping, and may even have a plan for all the data its able to collect.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

]]>Every attendee of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) is fairly used to the yoga, the HTML5, the gaming, and the death of (or change in) journalism panels. Recent years have added a plethora of social media and mobile application panels, but for 2011 the crowds who voted on various panels to have fastened onto two new trends: data as a double-edged sword and a lack of women in technology and startups.

The panels listed above illustrate the negative side of the growing use and sorting of data on people, places and objects, as well as a fear that corporations or governments aren’t using that data to benefit their customers. Sure, this is pretty obvious to anyone who feels like you can’t get something for nothing, but the rise of the surveillance market and governments accessing data as a means to curtail civil liberties or for other Orwellian purposes has really gained traction.

The flip side of abundant and open access to data is that it can make everything from figuring out your commute easier to holding lawmakers and city governments accountable (all while counting your calories as you lose weight). The conference also highlights in several panels how the intersection of mobile handsets and connected medical devices with health data can change the way healthcare is delivered and potentially lower costs.

Women in technology is perhaps the easier topic to handle given the issue has received mainstream attention this year from TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. Personally, I think the issue is bubbling up because of two reasons: for one, women have always been entrepreneurial and now it’s easier for them to create “tech startups” that might appeal to other women and men without requiring deep technical expertise on their parts or on the parts of their audience (I am not saying women can’t be technical demigods, just that they are underrepresented in the traditionally tech-heavy professions).

The second reason is that those who build and create consumer businesses are realizing that their audience is no longer comprised solely of male geeks, but a wider swath of humanity that includes women, and so designing products and services that appeal to them and put their experiences first can make lots of money (I’m not saying men can’t design perfectly wonderful products aimed at women, just that a female perspective has more value as more women adopt technology). I wrote about the dearth of women last year, but this year, women are getting a share of the spotlight at SXSW. Let’s see how we use it.

I’ve been attending SXSW Interactive for nine years and have seen the conference grow from a relatively manageable festival for the emerging world of web design and blogs to a conference that tries to be all things to almost all of the softer segments of technology and geek culture. As that culture has expanded, so has the show, but the trends bubbling up each year are also good reflections of how the spread of technology is reshaping our culture.